Toad? Hip-hop? The Waiting Room? You Must be Mental!
Me? Hip-hop? A genre I know absolutely nothing about, and can barely tolerate most of the time? Well yes, actually, this week on The Waiting Room I have a go at hip-hop. I fucking hate hip-hop with a passion for the most part, but this is basically due to the fact that it is a genre I don’t understand and know very little about.
Imagine if all you knew of indie was Coldplay, Kasabian and dickheaded antics of Pete Doherty – you’d dismiss it as empty cock-waving by middle class white cunts, wouldn’t you? Well all I really know of hip-hop is the exact equivalent – the awful, awful commercial side of the industry with bitches, hoes and that peculiar form of homophobia that is just a bit too passionate to be entirely above suspicion. Anyone who looks at the modern commercial hip-hop industry and doesn’t find it to be pathetic, contemptible and utterly disgusting is a cunt, simple as that. It’s grotesque, infantile and insulting to everyone involved.
That said, the original rap scene from which hip-hop evolved was a serious underground movement, full of intelligence and subversion. And a movement can’t be that big without having a significant number of really thoughtful, artistically inclined bands in there somewhere, so I know it is just my ignorance of the scene that keeps me from finding them. There are a couple of things in my library that are vaguely that way inclined and so I thought I’d throw them into The Waiting Room this week. Change being as good as a rest and all that.
So have a listen to this week’s Waiting Room, and see how DC and that Fisk character react to my choices:
The Waiting Room, Wednesday 26th March 2008
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And here are a couple of songs I didn’t put into my selection this week, but could have:
Roots Manuva – Witness
Jazzy Jeff – For Da Love Of Da Game
Oh, and DC has discovered the wonderful Art Pedro. Huzzah! Listen to this and then go and buy his albums from Fence Records.
Art Pedro – You’re a Twat
it’s like everything else: shit rises. the thuggery dominating the charts has fuck all to do with hiphop. recommendations: anything on anticon, sage francis, sole, el-p, aesop rock, saul williams, buck 65, jean grae, mf doom, prefuse 73, daedelus, dalek, public enemy, mos def, cannibal ox….
I agree with Marxsbeard; in most genres of music, you’ll find that the music is both recorded and followed by members of largely the same social demographic group. Then, as with any form of entertainment where success is measured financially, the vast majority of the output will conform to the lowest common denomenators available so as to mildly please as many people as possible.
This however leads to the repetition and complete absence of inventiveness that exists across vast swathes of music and that so disturbs the relatively small number of listeners who retain the ability to experience an emotional response to music. Those of us who demand a little more than being mildly pleased.
Hip-hop – as much as indie and any other genre – exists in the realm of the music industry, the music industry is run by accountants, and the accountants have no interest whatsoever in providing thrills for any minority group within its target audiences. Not enough margin in that. Paticularly when the majority of the audience is prepared to hand over their sheckels in abundance in order to be mildly pleased.
I’m sure that there are many hip-hop fans who think that all indie music is just navel-gazing pasty white boys wimpering their way through hours of sixth-form poetry about how tough their life was on the back seat of mummy’s Chelsea tractor, while incompetently strumming monotonous minor chords on electric guitars.
And of course the hip-hop fans are right. The most succesful ‘indie’-type bands – Snowplay, Cold Patrol and the rest of them – fit that stereotype perfectly.
To get any sort of emotional reward or intellectual challenge out of indie nowadays – as the people who visit the site have all found – you have to dig a little deeper. But the jewels are there if you search hard enough.
Perhaps hip-hop is the same…
I’m not a hip-hop aficianado by any means, but DJ Shadow’s “Entroducing” is one of the greatest records I’ve ever heard, of any genre.
Jesus, Marx! That’s got to be the most useful post per word I’ve ever had.
Toad, my mate Mr. E. over at http://berkeleyplace.wordpress.com/ is a bit of an aficionado of genre Hip Hop / Rap & will be a good source of what’s good & what’s shite info.
C&B – yes, DJ Shadow Entroducing is very good indeed.
Overall, having been listening to genre rap/Hip Hop for about 20years (I admit I’m a bit old skool in my tastes), I don’t know if I’d agree that the cross-over thing is as restricted/defined as depicted above.
Sure, ‘indie’ has its restrictions, simply because it covers such a wide array of musical types/styles/etc. & is far harder to pin down BUT, still, millions of people buy this stuff. It can’t all be a white, middle class demographic – remember, Travis were a genuine student group (i.e. not just white-skinned listeners) before they crossed over & they took a massively loyal fanbase with them when they did. I’ve been to Travis gigs & there’ve been healthy mixes of skin tone in the audiences. Coldplay, to a lesser extent, were the same.
Pete Cocherty, you must concede, as part of The Libertines had a black drummer (who was very visible in the indie world) & (to some extent) opened a way through which a lot of non-R’n'B/chart pop/reggae/all other stereotypically black music/etc. black kids to ‘come out’ & declare themselves ‘indie’. I am in no way suggesting Cocherty is a messiah in any way, but his little band did have at least some positive impact (esp. as it melded a lot of ska rhythms & stylings into its make up). Now we have Bloc Party (& a gay black front man at that, crossing over 2 divides in one) & a handful of others (Lightspeed Champion, anyone? etc.) & it’s publically ok for anyone of any background to declare a vested aural interest in what is (wrongly, in my humble) a white, middleclass pursuit. And, based on gigs I have been to(festivals et al), they most certainly do.
Also, the term ‘indie’ is a bit confusing. Everything is considered ‘indie’ these days; we mean ‘indie’ sounding, don’t we? i.e. GUITAR BANDS etc. Cold Play etc. have been tagged as ‘indie’ because they have a particular sound within this broad-brush sweep of a genre – & this style of music existed long before Coldplay & Travis et al became melodic scruffy cunts du jour. In truth the likes of Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Berlin, We Are Scientists, etc. etc. etc. etc. all have a healthy black audiebce/following. It just depends on what part of the world you’re viewing it all from.
Genre Hip Hop is, as mapped out above, very audience specific BUT I know a lot of white boys & girls (covering the rainbow of ‘class’ plateaus) into genre Hip Hop. There’re a number of ironic listeners (pseudo-Wiggas, perhaps) who love the 100% nonsense of the ‘bitch’ ‘ho’ ‘pop a cap in yo ass’ ’stomp on yo neck & skull fuck yo dying thoughts’ lyrics (because it is ludicrous & theatrically demented – ironic racism, I think it could be termed), & there are those who just like the rhythms & the beats & the melodies ‘cos dey is funkay.
Personally, I despise the misogyny. Yet I love Jay Z’s 99 Problems, because the beat & tune is fucking deliciously bouncy & the lyrics so self concisouly dumb they simply cannot be heart felt. I couldn’t really care less about the guns & gang bollox in any of this genre’s lyrics, nor the posturing & the shadow boxing (Mama Said Knock You Out anyone?) – if any of it leads to copycat/drive by/whatever deaths, huzzah! The less of the stupid cunts there are on the street the better. But I do like the music, the rhythm, the thing it does to your spine & hips. I’m white, some say middle class, 30-something & overweight. I look like a fucking twat on the dance floor. I don’t care, though. It’s music, I see no barrier or divide if it makes me wiggle a bit & shuffle my jelly roll.
Endtroducing? Greatest ever? I missed the meeting on that one. I’ve tried to listen to it but my attention just wanders. Every time. Eric B & Rakim. that’s where it was at. Bwoyeee [is that right?]
I’ve been a long-time hip-hop fan myself, though I listen a lot less there days (hence the lack of representation on The Daily Growl). I’ve had serious backpacker tendencies in the past, but I would be disingenuous if I said that all commercial hip-hop is crap. It clearly isn’t. The likes of Timbaland, Kanye West and even Pharrell have all had their hands in more than a few good things.
In fact I’d go as far as saying that pretty much all major hip-hop and R’n'B stars have had at least one really great tune. Even the unmitigated shite that is 50 Cent had In the Club at one point. Like all ‘dance music’ genres, you shouldn’t go looking for great albums – these are few and far between – it’s all about the individual tracks, usually singles. Which is why it’s best to have yer hip-hop on 12 inch.
Absolutely, TDG, absolutely.
i can’t believe that you would rage against homophobic slurs in commercial hip hop while at the same time condemning those you admittedly don’t understand with the word “cunt” – not only offensive but a most supremely hypocritical and un-self aware act. if you want to insult someone, can’t you find something else to call them?
I’m no anthropoligist, but I imagine that society has always divided itself along racial and social demographic lines ever since families of cavemen grew into tribes and began to interact – or indeed avoid interacting – with the next tribe down the road.
I’m a casual observer of the history of popular music, and there have always been demarcations between the musical styles favoured and created by people of different racial and social backgrounds.
Happily; there have also always been artists prepared to cross over those boundaries, and audiences keen to embrace them when they do. It’s been argued that pop music as we know it today exists solely because artists and performers were prepared to cross those boundaries. Wasn’t Elvis Presley an early example of such a crossover artist?
I find the term ‘indie’ frustrating and largely redundant too, but I’m struggling to find another term that defines the music that makes up the majority of my collection; that is (predictably enough) short-ish beat-based songs played mainly on guitars and drums and generally performed by the songwriters themselves.
DC – as for forgetting all that bollocks and just getting on with the business of wiggling and shuffling your wobbly bits to any tune that makes you behave in such a manner, well I’m right there with you, brother. However can I suggest that you’re a supporter of sites like this because you’re a member of an enlightened minority?
My rambling and befuddled point was that it strikes me that the majority of members of a particular social demographic group will tend to follow music made by their peers within that group. It’s perhaps regrettable, but it does seem to be the case. I love that there are exceptions to the rule, I wish I was more of an exception myself (I should probably put a bit more effort in there.) but the exceptions in the minority tend to find the cream of any particular genre appealing, while sadly the majority groups seem to just suck up any old dross as long as it sounds right and the performers look right.
bit of an odd one for me this. Find i’m agreeing/disagreeing with bits of what everybody’s saying. For of the issue is that there’s too much music, much of it dross, whether on an independent (what indie means to me) or major label, whether it’s black or white, urban or suburban. This obsession with genre, essentially a meaningless abstraction, is a result of this; an attempt to niche a product to a particular audience, to make it stand out, to attach it to something else for ease of identification. How do you market anything if it’s simply some amorphous bloc like ‘music’ or ‘food’ or ‘clothes’?
Not sure what dylan means by enlightened minority either. If anyone’s ever read the drowned in sound boards and comments you’d quickly realise the enlightened minority all sound like snobby cunts
alisalove: I have to tread very carefully here because we are getting into etymology & sexual politics & the interpretation of each – which is always a fucking doozie of a mix when dealing with derogatory language systems.
Cunt isn’t a word that’s in general use in Drunk COuntry House mainly because I think it is (a) a beauiful word in danger of being anethetised through over use & (b) quite a shocking word*, again in danger of being anethetised through over use. Now, you might counter, I use it a handful of times in my poorly informed diatribes above & therefore am adding to the dumbing/numbing of its overall effect. I do, I hope, use it with some tongue in cheek & not too inaccessible humour & it is considered as such; I also do like the use of the word (in the same way as Fuck or Nigger – another beautiful word with such damning connotations – are sometimes used) as a shock device i.e. usage for usage sake in the complete polar opposite of its usual ‘comfort’ zone (think the Tea Shop scene in Withnail & I).
However, & this is where I am positive our paths, alisalove, most certainly divide, I am using the term with its contemporary usage & meaning – i.e. as an insult absolutely not directly associated with female genitalia. In the UK at least it’s a long time since Cunt has been a serious & direct associate of Pussy, Vagina, Fanny, Snatch, et al. I don’t even think it’s that prevalent in the hardcore porn industry these days, simply because it isn’t deemed a particularly attractive term, even when utilized within the sexually semi-aggressive context of “fuck me in my fucking tight, wet cunt you fucking fuck; I love it” or somesuch.
I get the juxtapositioning of the insult & its assumed comparison with the female sex organ, i.e. the usual aggression behind the usage must therefore transfer to the user’s opinion of the female genitalia &, by proxy, females themselves. That, I think, really is a very old & lazy method of crying victim for the sake of crying victim. If nothing else that statement alone will probably have me hunted down by a radical feminist element.
A short history lesson courtesy of a handful of etymology sites that can reduce the thinking on this kind of topic far neater than I: Cunt is believed to derive from a Germanic root kunton “female genitalia”, which also gave rise to Old Norse kunta (ancestor of Norwegian & Swedish dialectical kunta & Danish dialectical kunte), Old Frisian, Middle Low German & Middle Dutch kunte, & the English doublet quaint.
By the way, the word wasn’t always considered derogatory, even though it is today. Be careful about assuming that a word’s modern connotations must have governed its formation. Also, no connection has been made between the Germanic & Latin cunnus. The proto-Germanic root of cunt is ku- i.e. “hollow place”, while the Indo-European root of Latin cunnus is (s)keu- “to cover, to conceal”, the etymological meaning of cunnus being “sheath”.
‘Cu’ also has associations with knowledge: ‘can’ & ‘ken’ (both ‘to know’) evolved from the ‘cu’/'ku’ prefix. Indeed, there is a significant linguistic connection between sex & knowledge: one can ‘conceive’ both an idea & a baby, and ‘ken’ means both ‘know’ & ‘give birth’. ‘Ken’ shares a genealogical meaning with ‘kin’ & ‘kind’, from the Old English ‘cyn’ & the Gothic ‘kuni’
In Celtic & modern Welsh, ‘cu’ is rendered as ‘cw’, a similarly feminine prefix influencing the Old English ‘cwithe’ (‘womb’), from the Welsh ‘cwtch’. Interestingly, ‘cwtch’ (also ‘cwtch’, with modern forms ‘cwts’ and ‘cwtsh’) means ‘hollow place’ as a noun (& is thus another vaginal metaphor) & ‘hide’ as a verb. ‘Cwm’ also shares the ‘cw’ prefix, however its feminine origins seem initially perplexing, as it means ‘valley’. In fact, this topographical definition is clearly a vaginal metaphor, as valleys are as furrowed & fertile as vaginas (although the Welsh slang words for ‘vagina’ are ‘cont’ & ‘chuint’ rather than ‘cwm’). Viz magazine (William H Bollocks, 1997) punned on the sound of the Welsh phrase ‘pobol y cwm’ (‘people of the valley’) with ‘pobolycwm’, defined as “people who like quim”.
‘Cwm’ is pronounced ‘come’, though ‘quim’, an English slang term for ‘vagina’, is a mispronounced Anglicisation of it. ‘Quim’ has been extended to form ‘quimwedge’ (literally ‘vaginal wedge’, thus ‘penis’), which is especially interesting as it utilises ‘wedge’ to mean ‘penis’ when, in fact, ‘cunt’ itself derives from the Latin for ‘wedge’ (‘cuneus’).
So there’s a lot of reasons the word’s meaning/usage has evolved from simply female genitalia to a direct, aggressive, vulgar insult. All the connotations of & interpretive values of the sexual possibilities of the variants of the word’s origins are all mixed up with the formation of, as we know it, the English language.
The transgression of the F-Bomb, as my mate Ed in New York calls it, is a serious factor in the retardation of said common language – by that he means the more in use, say, the Fuck word is, the more available it is to vulnerable ears who retain its function minus the impact, the less of a threat it becomes, the less of a statement it makes & so on. Cunt is used as punctuation in certain parts of my home city (& I know for an absolute fact it is used without flinch, almost like breathing in & out, in certain parts of Edinburgh & Glasgow & the like) – the traveller encampments on the fringes of Cardiff for example, parents & children, are littered with its use (albeit with bile & gritted teeth). BUT I know for a fact it is not consciously used as a comparison to or an opinion of a lady’s front bum.
oops, I missed the *, so here it is now: *by shocking I do not mean shocking for the absolute simple art of shocking; I’m talking about its aesthetic purpose. It’s like seeing blood on snow or a single white light in an otherwise unlit environment. The aesthetic of the langauge we use & propogate is as important as the arrangement of & function therafter (of any individual word or phrase & its link to its immediate environment) in the role of communication. Cunt, for me, is a deeply satisfying word not least because of the historical fear of its place in the English language. It’s terribly unfortunate that from its original place in our language’s birth (i.e. the first known recording of that combination of letters was in the London street name from about 1230. That street name was, interestingly, Gropecuntelane, one of a warren of streets & alleyways all given over to the lowest forms of prostitution & bawdry) it is now considered a derogatory term towards women – this is a gross misunderstanding of its history & underlying usage.
Yes, it has female/sexual links (that cannot be denied) but, like a whole host of words which are now in common use & no longer bear the mark of ‘violently’ derogatory due to the passage of time & assimilation, it is only offensive to those who carry the baggage of a long dead direct association (specifically, in this case, to a derogatory term meaning ‘whore’ or ‘prostitute’). It gets flak because it is such a powerful cnostruction of a word in itself – mono-syllabic, heavy on vowel expression, the hardness of the “cuh” & “nnn” sounds, & the stress relationship between the ‘uh’ & the ‘tuh’ sounds, all add up to the way it bursts out of your mouth even when said softly. Some may consider this ’sound’ aggressive or offensive, I consider it almost a perfect word albeit one that should be used wisely & economically, yet devoid of censorship & misguided fear.
hah. entirely missed the alisalove comment and spent the past ten minutes wondering if my flippant use of the see-en-you-tee word had provoked some kind of etymological debate. and it wisnae me…
quite the response drunk country.
What a bunch of twats.
Good work DC! Fascinating.
I always thought of cwtch as a tender and compassionate word, used as it in Welsh families to mean ‘cuddle’.
From now on I’ll think twice when someone says “Aww.. give us a cwtch..”
And you’ve given me a delicious new term of endearment to use on my mates down the pub.. “Oi! You fuckin’ quimwedge!”
Lovely, lovely stuff..
Cheers!
Christ.
That’s what happens when there’s a crashing come down after almost a month of furiously frantic running around like a fucking idiot all over the States & Europe only to find Monday morning it all starts again, but in a slightly different direction. All that locked in partially interesting/useful trivia shit & bollocks, usually firmed down by too much ‘work’ brainweight, has to perculate & bubble to the surface at some point.
I promise I’ll behave the next time you go away.
Wow, talk about a blog to get a debate started.
Yes, there is an enormous amount of ugly pigheaded hiphop sprayed all over the media, but there is as much again, maybe more clever, thoughtful, conscious, witty, self-deprecating and downright life-affirming music out there if you can be bothered to look beyond MTV and shite payola radio.
I make a point of never watching music tv, reading mainstream music/style mags, listening to corporate radio. I get my new music from switched-on friends and djs, conscious bloggers, internet radio, good record shops -remember them? – for great hiphop try:
http://www.fatcity.co.uk/sales/
The renewed enjoyment I’ve found in music over the past ten or more years since I ditched any form of advertised/hyped music has been immense, and has led me to discover many amazing artists and tracks. Hiphop, as can be said for so much music today, is a genuine artform that has been perverted by the industry to reinforce stereotypes and make a ton of money.
Roots Manuva’s Witness never fails to get a party started (or provide the end of night anthem). I have just done a dirty re-edit which you can find on my blog-
http://floormanpresents.blogspot.com/
Keep on digging for the goodstuff, and stop buying/listening to the bad – then it may stop…
Thanks Floorman, I will definitely get stuck into those two links. As I said above, it is the commercial face of hip hop that has put me off, but in my ignorance it’s very hard to just pick out the really good places to find the thoughtful stuff.
I make no claim of superiority for ‘my’ genre though, because with a few exceptions mainstream indie has been awful for a while too, but I don’t get the impression that the truly aggressively anti-social stuff has been quite so bad.
I am still trying to figure out where the awful cartoonish portrayal is coming from – from within the community itself, from marketing execs trying to sell to a suburban audience, from execs who want a simplistically defined product, or from whom?
Maybe it’s like many prejudicial stereotypes: starts off outside the community in question and is slowly co-opted by them as a way of taking it off the people who are prejudiced against them.